Critique: Soccer journalism

In beginning journalism classes, instructors will ask the question: What is news? Students call out terms like immediacy, oddity, conflict, importance…In American sports pages, relevance plays a key role in the undoing of reporting about soccer. In general, U.S. soccer coverage always seems defensive, it tries too hard to prove the importance of the sport, and it feels like it has an agenda, which is the curse of death in objective journalism. When I was in Europe last week, I read the International Herald Tribune, and I was reminded how enjoyable it is to read intelligent, straight-forward writing about the sport. An example, here, by Rob Hughes.